Yes. If all answers boil down to "god did it" then there's no place for scientific thought at all. No questions go unanswered, so it takes the wind out of the sails of science.

No. If all answers boil up to "god did it that way". whether im not a believer its clear to me both concepts are not so antagonistic. Maybe its the only option that clever believers has left, to understand (sorry i mean to believe) evolution was the tool god did use to create life. That will be a big step for religion and the "appropiate adaptation" as scientific evidence gets more and more obvious, but inst it obvious enough now? When someone wants to believe something it can be imposible to change his/her mind. Everyone must be carefull its easy to change a blindness for another blindness without being aware of it, dont you think so?

So if evolution is the "means" that god chose to achieve some purpose, then what value is added to the beleif system by assuming the existence of a god, if evolution is fully capable of achieving the result? That kind of utilization of a god concept violates Occam's Razor, and is therefore inferior philosophy.

So if evolution is the "means" that god chose to achieve some purpose, then what value is added to the beleif system by assuming the existence of a god, if evolution is fully capable of achieving the result? That kind of utilization of a god concept violates Occam's Razor, and is therefore inferior philosophy.

Occam´s Razor is easy indeed to violate because it talks about probability not certainty. It is just one of the most usefull heuristics. what value is added to the beleif system by assuming the existence of a god, if evolution is fully capable of achieving the result? For me any at all but dont you think it has a great value if you believe in god and desperately need to keep thinking there´s a god up there? I tell you a lot of people is not going to miss that chance.Anyway, why is evolution fully capable of develope life? because of the physics laws that were ¿created? at the begining of this universe. So the main problem will be to know if such laws were produced at random or choosed and i will say at random, just like the fact that humans exist at the earth and not on other planets (well let me assume that) which is pure random aswell

As I read the story of evolution, however, and all the incredibly complex set of circumstances around the events that took place in order to get us to this point (let alone the story of the universe itself), I can't help but wonder the same question at every step of the way: WHY?!

It's down to faith in the activities of a mythological being versus empirical evidence. For me that's no contest. (For example, the fact that even loose scientific evidence puts humans and dinosaurs millions of years apart. The creationists give great credence to the superiority of humans and yet won't accept the evidence from human devised paleontological dating methods that are widely validated and very accurate. Are humans cognitively equivalent to the dinosaurs then or do we possess a profound intelligence and inventiveness? The creationists can't have it both ways.)

As I read the story of evolution, however, and all the incredibly complex set of circumstances around the events that took place in order to get us to this point (let alone the story of the universe itself), I can't help but wonder the same question at every step of the way: WHY?!

The fact that it took so long to develop multi-cellular organisms would not by itself discount the possibility of an intelligent designer (for me at least). The time frame is relative. 3 billion years may only be a second's worth of time in the universe.

I am still stuck with the laws of causality, however. Even if traditional notions of God are terribly outdated, mythologically based, and far from actuality in regards to the emergence of biological complexity, the creation event(s) remain terribly mysterious. Perhaps, the force behind the big bang had no idea what it was doing (a purely un-intelligent non-designer). Perhaps the "creator" is the laws of physics. There may be no design- the laws of physics simply are what they are.

It's down to faith in the activities of a mythological being versus empirical evidence.

I agree. But science seems to be coming down shorter and shorter at every turn as of late regarding the nature of things once it broke nature down to the smallest possible component. With words like 'mistery' and 'paradox' having taken firm hold of modern physics I almost dare to say that we're not that much better than we were five or six centuries ago; except for 'the bomb' , maybe. My "WHY" question is an ancient phylosophical one; and one that's been touched on here at BM in the past. And it persists because, as simple as it is, it just cannot be answered easily. It touches on all dimensions of being human, and it has so far left me with an empty feeling in the face of its insurmountability.